New: May 7 TLC Online

The May 7 edition of The Living Church is available online to registered subscribers.

This issue features a review by Rowan Williams, master of Magdalene College, of A Time to Keep: Theology, Mortality, and the Shape of a Human Life by the Rev. Ephraim Radner. Archbishop Williams writes:

Anything written by Ephraim Radner can be guar- anteed to be serious, constructively difficult, spiritually challenging and original, and this book is no exception. It will be hard to classify, though; it is essentially an essay in theological anthropology, but is at the same time an exceptionally wide-ranging essay on our North Atlantic cultural crisis. In a nutshell, what he argues is that our Western society has lived through a “Great Transition” involving altered expectations of life and health, and reduced birth rates. We are less and less capable of seeing our lives as following a God-given trajectory in which birth, generation, and death constitute the way God gives us of being human and growing in our humanity to the point at which we resign our lives into God’s hands for a “Great Transfiguration.” Learning to inhabit this trajectory is the “Great Traversal,” the journey in which we enact and echo God’s traversing of human experience in Jesus Christ, the divine act that has established that the prosaic transitions of our routine experience are the stuff of which the new creation will be made — not by our effort or success, but by God’s mercy.

News

Market Logic on Good Friday

Features

Cranmer and Congregational Singing | By Andrew-John Bethke

Worship in Red, Green, and Blue | By Michael Kesar

Books

A Time to Keep | Review by Rowan Williams

The Road to Character | Review by Mac Stewart

Exploring Catholic Theology | Review by Jonathan Mitchican

The New Monasticism | Review by Andrew Petiprin

Virginia Cary Hudson | Review by Zachary Guiliano

The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology | Review by Robert MacSwain